No promise can break in a life of promise.

I knew my father like the back of his hand.

The back of his hand, the front of his hand, his palm threshed my leg in wild swipes. He was possessed by his own inadequacy. His short temper and busted ambition turned him to barely-held frenzy, but eyes betrayed his fear. Nobody knew in the moment, least of all him, whether it was fear of who he was or how far he could go. Something inside of him wanted me to feel it too.

It’s fear stoked by bitterness. By petty betrayal. By guilt of what he became. By midnight vodka visits to the garden shed. By promises broken in the fire of life.

No promise can break in a life of promise.

Cowering in a corner is how it ends or, rather, is adjourned. I curled into a ball with my hands over my head. Disassociation, ordering perfectly rational numbers around in my head to prove some kind of perfect relationship that marries up the geometry of the wallpaper with a series of numbers. Abstracting my world into a stream of nonsense mathematics, a human log table. Calculating inverses, primes, the square root of 2, anything. My mind races in the search for constants, I continually drop streams of thought, then pick up others, and look for the plan that ties the numbers to the reality of this room. Drawing comfort from the sense that something adds up in the Universe.